The Bio Report Transforming Drug Discovery and Disease Research—One Cell at a Time
Oct 8, 2025
In this enlightening discussion, Hani Goodarzi, a core investigator at the ARC Institute, shares insights on the Virtual Cell Atlas, a groundbreaking initiative that aggregates single-cell data. Joining him are Gilad Almogy, CEO of Ultima Genomics, who highlights their cost-effective sequencing technology, and Serge Saxonov, CEO of 10x Genomics, explaining how scalable sequencing enables extensive data generation. Together, they explore how this innovative platform aims to revolutionize drug discovery, offering models that predict cellular responses and enhance understanding of disease mechanisms.
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Reimagining Big-Scale Biology
- ARC is designed to fund long-term, large-scale biological projects that standard grants can't support.
- It treats big biology efforts like the Large Hadron Collider equivalent to accelerate cross-disciplinary discovery.
Atlas Built For Perturbation Modeling
- The Virtual Cell Atlas aggregates harmonized single-cell data to train AI models simulating cell behavior.
- Tahoe Therapeutics contributed a large perturbational dataset (TAHO-100M) to enable perturbation-based modeling.
Scale Is The Core Advantage
- Single-cell sequencing's power is scale: millions of cells reveal cell types, states, and disease mechanisms.
- Integrating data across labs demands consistent tools, compute infrastructure, and incentives to share.